Monetary History, Exchange Rates and Financial Markets is an impressive collection of original papers in honour of Charles Goodhart's outstanding contribution to monetary economics and policy. Charles Goodhart has written extensively on many of these topics and has become synonymous with his...

Foreign-exchange operations did not end after the United States stopped its activist approach to intervention. Japan persisted in such operations, but avoided overt confl ict with its monetary policy. With the onset of the Great Recession, Switzerland has transacted in foreign exchange both for...

This paper describes the United States’ first line of defense against shortcomings in the Bretton Woods system, which threatened the system’s continuation as early as 1960. The exposition describes the Federal Reserve’s use of swap lines both to provide cover for central banks’ unwanted...

In this paper, we describe the evolution of the Federal Reserve’s swap lines from their inception in 1962 as a mechanism to forestall claims on U.S gold reserves under Bretton Woods to a means of extending emergency dollar liquidity during the Great Recession. We describe a number of...